>>>>>and lets wear them while doing dangerous stuff like walking
>>>>>
>>>>>http://www.magma.ca/~ocbc/jpeds.html
>>>>
>>>>How about in the states, we start by building sidewalks first? Most schools in North Carolina do not even have sidewalks between them and the local neighborhoods and children that live withing a 2.5 mile radius have to walk. It has always bothered me and letters to the editors of newspapers and local congressman have been of no use.
>>>
>>>One of the things that made us decide to move to Virginia Beach was that it has sidewalks... mostly. I know a few places in the neighborhood where they just stop... or rather, if you're coming from the other direction, start out of the green. But generally they exist, and since they usually aren't used much, it's actually quite a nice place to use a bicycle for transportation - except that everything is a bit too far even for a bike. In Charlottesville, you'd have streets where about 40% of the lots had sidewalks. And there was a grandfather clause, that you had to build one only for new buildings, so closer to downtown you got, the worse it was. Then downtown itself was purely pedestrian (one of those designated as "historic"), but you actually had to drive or ride to there; you couldn't really walk to there.
>>
>>In Illinois no one over the age of 11 is supposed to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk.
>
>Go where, then? On the road?
>
>Back home it's actually forbidden to ride/drive any vehicle on the sidewalk. You can only maneuver to load/unload, or push it. Bicycle? You ride it on the bike path or go into real traffic - you're a vehicle on equal footing with others. So are the horse & buggy combos :).
>
>In the cities in my flatlands pretty much everybody knows how to, to use an expression from this side of the puddle, share the road. That works - I went to work on bike for years, driving through the awfully crowded downtown streets, which were designed for horse carts. There were accidents, but mostly with elderly people who'd be somewhat deaf or absent-minded. They'd just take a left turn in the middle of the road, because their piece of land was on the left, without even looking whether any car was coming - I had to slam the brakes several times. With younger folks there was no trouble, we all went through extensive traffic training in elementary school - our kids on bikes behave much more disciplined (traffic wise :) than the kids here. I've never seen one driving left side, or just zigzagging the road. You may see a couple driving in parallel so they can talk, if the street isn't too busy - they take a width of a car, but still makes me uncomfortable (even if I'm on the right
>bike).
>
>The other trouble were drivers from Belgrade - they'd toot their horns as soon as they'd see a bicycle on the road, because they'd get scared stoolless - they didn't know what to do. That created several troubles: the biker is startled by a sudden honk right behind his back (the moron could have honked from a larger distance), may veer (happened to me - managed to keep it short, but was still dangerous) and may get into bad language ("...your Belgrader mother!").

Yes, on the road. Bicycles are supposed to travel on the right side of the road, going in the same direction as traffic on their side.